CHIRP

You have the fake ports because you have developer mode enabled, which you shouldn't. Developer mode is for developers only and provides no benefit (and some downside, as you can see) to regular users.

That said, your port is not being crowded out by the fake ports, there's no such limit. Your debug log was not captured properly so there's no information in it about ports. Go try to download and then capture a debug log and we can see some detail about what it found. However, I can almost guarantee you that the problem is outside of chirp's control. Either it's a serial adapter problem, or the driver for it. But, if you capture a debug log with the low-level output I can confirm for you.

That will teach me to push buttons I that I have no idea what they do. No idea why/when I would have done that. Didn’t even notice.
I will do as you have suggested and get you a better debug log on my other issues, if they still exist.
Reason I thought ports were finite was when I delete the trek entry that’s there right now, it would then see my Baofeng port (for example) but only if I deleted it.
Will try to get caught up on my donations too.

No worries Skip. I assure you there's no (intentional or practical) limit on the number of ports. If you've got a Prolific PL-2303 based cable, the most common case is Windows update having uninstalled your backleveled driver, deleting the port in the process. Windows users with cables that use that ill-fated driver (which are very very common) have to constantly do the dance of re-backleveling the driver to keep using their hardware.

I have entries like this in Chirp now, too. They weren't there in previous versions I've used, but I just installed the chirp-20240306-py3-none-any.whl update on Linux, and these "fake" radios showed up in the "Port" setting when I selected "Download From Radio." I've never seen them before, and I know I didn't recently do anything in settings to enable developer mode. I believe I did so on the old version of Chirp, but not the new one.

Perhaps the update has developer mode on by default.

Joseph, can you grab me your config file? On linux it's in ~/.chirp/chirp.config. Also a screenshot of the download dialog showing the ports? Thanks! If something is wrong I want to get that fixed ASAP.

Thanks, you have developer=True in the state section. Have you been using chirp for a while such that your config file might have been generated in a much older version? The flag is likely (still) there from the previous version. The fake ports and radio models are new as of maybe a year ago, so depending on when and what you upgraded from, that may be the reason you're just now noticing the effect.

It just so happens that I have something queued up to change how some of that logic works anyway, so I won't spend too much time trying to figure out if or how that might've been enabled accidentally. If you have a chance to grab tomorrow's build and confirm that it is and stays disabled, I'd appreciate it.

(and yeah, I should have warned you that the config might need some sanitizing, sorry about that)

I did have developer mode turned on back when I used to get the old version of Chirp in a Flatpak and probably even before it was packaged that way. If that carried over into this new version, that would explain why it was on, and perhaps that was the case. I don't recall seeing the "fake" ports in any previous install, however, and I update fairly regularly. I believe my prior update was from January of this year. Thank you for looking into this matter.

Ah, okay, yeah the flag would carry over for sure, so glad to solve that mystery. The developer fakes have been in there since last fall, so not for a super long time, but since before January at least.

Thanks!